You know, this is a special place for me, Essex. My wife, Katie and I, we met right here at Essex Middle School. Katie finished her degree at Champlain College while she was raising these young kids over here in the front row. You're going to hear a couple of common themes today. Justine, Kamira. Really, really important to note that these things—and I'm already off-script. I apologize to the translator, but listening to these themes that were shared earlier, the consistency of them is really important to note. The consistency of them is there because they're important and they're real. Champlain, Vermont, the city of Burlington. It's full of artists, builders, teachers, entrepreneurs, technologists, students, and people who care deeply about their community. It's a place where ideas can still feel personal and relationships endure. Where companies, schools, families, machine shops, friends, neighborhoods—they all feel connected in a special way. For those of you that are from Vermont, I hope you feel proud of this place. For those of you who came here to college, I hope Burlington, Vermont and Champlain always stays a piece of you and it always will be. My hope is that some of you will make this your home. And for those of you who leave, I hope you always return to Burlington and Champlain as a home that welcomes you with open arms. Champlain's motto, 'let us dare.' It's a great motto for a commencement, and it's a good motto for life. Today is one of those rare days where you get to look in two directions at once. You get to look back at everything that got you here: the late nights, the people who helped you, the moments when it would have been easier to say, 'I'm done, I'm out.' And the choice you made, the work you did to get here today when nobody was watching. And now you get to look forward. For some of you, the next step's the first job, a new city, a new company, a new field, or a new version of yourself. For others, especially the online graduates here, this degree came while you were already working, raising families, serving or caring for others, or rebuilding some part of your life. Just like Katie did, just like we did together. That's a different kind of accomplishment. It takes persistence. It takes a long view. It takes deciding the work matters before the reward is visible.
I want to share a few things today that I've learned from building, flying, starting over, failing, and building BETA here in Vermont. They're not complicated ideas, but they've helped me a lot in my life: love the work, keep going, surround yourself with people who believe in you, do the hidden work right, and act before the path is perfectly clear. The first is simple: love what you do. I love creating things, I love flying, I love machines, I love the smell of a machine shop, the feel of the metal, and the first time something you created comes to life. It takes to the air. I love aircraft because they're unforgiving. They don't care about your pitch deck, your title, your intention, or your explanation. They either work or they do not. Mother nature is wildly consistent in her application of physics. That clarity has always appealed to me. When you truly love the work, effort feels different. It's still hard. It's still tiring. You still have bad days, but the work pulls you toward it. You don't need to be pushed every day. You're drawn back to the problem because you care about solving it. In that way, the work becomes easy. Easy because it's natural to return to it. Easy because you're not negotiating with yourself every morning on whether the work matters. Easy because you're doing the thing that has the pull on you. That's been true for me at BETA. We didn't start the idea of building a company that looked good and impressive from the outside. We started with a problem that we cared about. We believed electric aviation could be cleaner, simpler, and quieter. We believed we could build a world-class aviation business right here in Vermont. A lot of people thought that was crazy. They weren't being unreasonable. Aerospace is hard. Certification is hard. Electric propulsion is hard. Building an aircraft is very expensive. Building an aircraft that regulators, pilots, passengers, and customers can trust and get on every day is even harder. But if you love the work, the hard doesn't scare you away. It clarifies the path. At BETA, we have clear values. They're not meant to be slogans on the wall. They're really meant to be things that we lean on when things get hard. One of them is care the most. I love that value because it's both emotional and practical. If you care the most, you stay with the problem longer. You notice the details. You don't walk past the thing that's wrong. You hold the standard when nobody is looking. That's what love for work looks like; sometimes it looks like discipline. Love's not a soft idea here. Love for the work: it's what keeps you close enough to the work to make you excellent at the work.
The second thing I've learned is that persistence matters almost more than anything. My friend and colleague, Martine Rothblatt, she has a saying. Persistence is omnipotence. I believe that. But I want to be clear about what I mean. I don't believe in patience. At least that's not a good word for me. Patience is the ability to accept delay without frustration. That's never sounded like me. Persistence is different. Persistence is active. Persistence is not sitting still and waiting. Persistence is putting one more stone on the wall. I build stone walls. That's what I was doing this morning. I sent you a picture. If you look at a wall as a whole, it can feel impossible. Too many stones, too many cuts, too much time. You're not going to build the wall in a day or even a week. But that's not the job. The job is to pick up the next stone. Look at it. Turn it. Analyze it. Figure out where it goes. And then place the stone. Then do it again. And again. And that's how hard things are built. That's how BETA has been built. One customer, one test, one failure, one redesign, one flight, one more stone. People see a company sometimes after it has momentum, they assume there was some grand, clear plan from the beginning. There wasn't. There was conviction. There was persistence. We kept going when test failed. We kept going when the answer wasn't obvious. We kept going when the problem was harder than we wanted it to be. That's what I would ask for you to leave here today, remembering. Don't expect the wall to be built in a day. Don't confuse a slow start with failure. Don't confuse difficulty with evidence that you're on the wrong path. Some of the best things in life require the ability to defer gratification. That's true if you're building a company. I pitched BETA for 13 years. 13 years of rejection. And it did one thing. It helped me clarify the vision.
The third thing, and this was a good one, Justine said, find people around you who believe in you. I have that. I have my wife, Katie. She's given me the ability to take risks, not because she thought every idea would work, not because she thought I wouldn't make mistakes. She knew I'd make mistakes. I’ve made plenty of them. But she believed. However I landed, I'd land. Katie has always understood something important. If I fail at a task, if I lose a pitch, even if I mess up this commencement speech, we don't fail as a people. We learn and then we go on. If the business idea doesn't work, if a risk doesn't pay off, if money comes and goes, it's not the same thing as losing who you are. The people around you will shape which risks you're willing to take. They shape whether you become smaller or you become braver with time. So choose carefully. Find people who tell you the truth and challenge you. Find people you know that are imperfect, but that know you are imperfect and they believe in you anyway. And then go do that for somebody else. Be there for them before the outcome is obvious. Give them room to make mistakes. Give them the truth when they need it. Give them confidence to take the next step. That's how people grow. I've learned a lot of this from the chair of our board. His name is Chuck Davis. Chuck has a way of listening that makes people better. He cares about people in a way that's not performative. He invests in other people's success, and he treats people kindly. These sound like simple things. They're really not. Listening is hard when things are moving fast. Caring is hard when the pressure is high. Investing in someone else's success is hard when you're worried about your own. And treating people kindly is hard when the stakes are real and your day isn't going very well. But those things are the things that people remember. They remember whether you listened, whether you cared, whether you helped them grow, whether you treated them with dignity when you had the leverage. That's leadership. That's friendship. And that's how you build trust. And trust is how you enable someone else's greatness.
The fourth is doing the right thing when no one is looking. In aviation, that's not a slogan. That's the business. Most things that matter on an aircraft are things that people will never see. The routing of a wire, the quality of a bond, the torque on a fastener. There's no crowds for that work. There's no social media post. At BETA, we fly what we build. That means we live with the consequences of our own work. It means the quality of the hidden work matters. That lesson, it fits well beyond aviation. Your life will be shaped not by what you do when people are watching. It will be shaped by what you do when no one's watching. How you prepare, how you treat people that can't help you, and maybe people you'll never see again, how carefully you do the small things. Pride in hidden work is one of the clearest signs of character. And character compounds, and the person who does the hidden work becomes trusted. And trust is about the most valuable thing you can ever build. The fifth is to act before the path is perfectly clear. When I say this, I'm talking about embracing risk, reaching out, putting your arms around it, embracing risk. Not for the purpose of adrenaline. Not for doing something reckless just to feel alive. I mean the bold move. Starting a business, committing to someone, starting a new career, moving to a new city, and maybe building a home. Taking responsibility for a problem that doesn't yet have a clear answer. Doing nothing or staying put. That's often the default. It can look safe. It can look responsible. You can look like the adult in the room, but a bias for the action that exposes the issues. It gives you something to charge at. It turns fear into information. You can analyze forever. You can make presentations forever. You can debate forever. But at some point the aircraft has to fly. That's when the ultimate learning happens. That's when you find the real issues. The goal is not to be reckless. The goal is to act with enough courage and boldness to create the evidence, to make the move, to learn, to adjust, and to keep going. As an entrepreneur and a builder, I've also learned that it can be good to have a little less time and a little less money than you think you need. Said differently, start before you think you should, and when you don't have the resources or the experience. Because they will come. Constraint drives pragmatism and urgency. It forces you to simplify. It forces you to make choices. It forces you to stop admiring the problem and start solving it. Too much time. It can make things complex. Too much money. You can confuse spending with progress. Constraint forces you to know what matters and delete what doesn't.
The last thing I'll leave with you is choose a standard for your life and then live up to it. When you build anything real, a product, a company, a career, a family, a community, or even a relationship, there's no hiding from the real work it'll take. You can explain it. You can market it. You can make it look good from a distance, and even on social media. But in the end, the thing either holds up or it doesn't. The standard you hold when no one is watching becomes the standard people will eventually see. Champlain has helped to prepare you to get ready for work, for life, and ready to make a difference. Skills matter. Practical ability matters. But where you choose to aim those skills, I would argue it matters even more. So aim them at something you care about. Aim that at something that you love. You don't need to have your whole life figured out today. Most of the best things are built stone by stone, day by day, and choice by choice. And remember the motto of this college written out there in the hallway: let us dare. Congratulations, Class of 2026. Thank you, president.
